Sun Media political reporter Jonathan Jenkins said it best in a tweet from the weekend Ontario Liberal leadership convention: “Prepare to have a lot of ‘conversations’. It’s one of @Kathleen_Wynne’s favourite words.”

We could be wrong, but politicians who like to have ‘conversations,’ and who go on about the “issues around” things, often tend to be those who avoid blunt realities.

Kathleen Wynne had barely taken the baton from Dalton McGuinty, becoming Ontario’s first handoff premier in a decade, before she filled voters in on ‘conversations’ she’d like to have.

For example, she wants to disabuse anyone of the notion she can’t be leader for all Ontarians hailing from Toronto, a rarity in the premier’s office. Fair enough. She also wants to quickly call the legislature back to work, by Feb. 19.

So far, so good. It was the Liberals, after all, who pulled the plug on the assembly for their hurry-up changing of the guard. And, then, the eyebrow-raiser — Wynne says Ontarians don’t want an election and she intends to make the minority Liberal government work.

Given a choice, most voters are prepared to cut new leaders a brief honeymoon. But Wynne’s elevation to premier was no marriage sealed by the electorate. Ordinary voters didn’t choose her — her party did. And handoff premiers in Ontario tend not to fare well when voters are left out of the arrangements. The only other two in the last 28 years, Ernie Eves and Frank Miller, went down like flaming sambuca.

How long Wynne gets to stick around without a mandate from Ontarians, well, that’s a ‘conversation’ voters will take up with her. But a government that’s in hock up to its eyeballs, like this one, weighed down not just by a $12 billion budget deficit but also heavy political scandals, doesn’t leave a lot of room for idle chit-chat with a premier hoping to be cut some slack.

The first adult ‘conversation’ will be in Wynne’s first big test — a spring budget. Under pressure by its bond raters to whip its red ink after years of overspending, the McGuinty government only passed its last budget by caving in to NDP demands to scrap a business tax cut and slap a surtax on the rich.

Now, with a lefty premier at Queen’s Park, Andrea Horwath’s NDP may not even have to play hard-to-get: Wynne will want to buy all the extra time she can before facing voters.

But that’s not the only ‘conversation’ Ontarians will want with their new premier.

Will she keep carpeting rural Ontario with unwanted wind farms, and sticking taxpayers with the hefty subsidies they’ve had to pay for the monstrosities? Will she get serious about public service wage freezes?

There’s also the little matter of how Wynne’s government — we can call it that, because she’s been at the cabinet table almost the whole time — managed to blow at least $230 million to get out of two gas-plant contracts in Toronto, without taxpayers getting a single thing. Ontarians, you’ll remember, were busy having a very heated ‘conversation’ about just that issue — it appeared the Liberals had quietly nixed the plants simply to save their own political skins in Toronto-area ridings — when McGuinty abruptly shut down the legislature and announced his departure.

Another talking point to resume will be the Ornge air ambulance fiasco, fuelled by new revelations — they also popped up after the legislature was prorogued — of questionable expenses rung up on the taxpayers’ dime by former Ornge boss Chris Mazza. If time permits, some Ontarians will also want to know what new ideas — are there any? — are coming from the nine-year-old government. But that’s a ‘conversation’ for another day. They call it an election.